First off, let me say how much I admire The Means of Reproduction, right down to the clever -- more than clever -- title. It brings together so many crucial strands of recent history and current international politics, and in such a confident, sure-footed way. Plus, it's so well written! It should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand our world, from the proliferation of NGOs to the outbreak of fundamentalism around the world, including here in the US.

The Means of Reproduction ought to change the conversation around women's rights. As others have said, atrocities against women and the persistent denial of women's rights reflect a fundamental belief that what happens to women, while sad or regrettable, just isn't that important. It doesn't turn larger wheels -- the means of production, for example, or the fate of nations. It's only recently that human-rights campaigners began to include women's rights in their mission and development experts began to see that the subjection of women -- child marriage, lack of control over fertility, maternal injury and mortality, illiteracy, lack of property rights, domestic violence and so on -- helps keep countries poor and populations ignorant, sickly and in turmoil.

I agree with Michelle that the cause of women needs allies. And vice versa! Look, for example, at how women's low status combined with male sexual privilege has fuelled the AIDS epidemic: whether as wives, prostitutes, girlfriends or young girls who trade sex for "presents" from older men, women in much of the world do not have enough social or economic or even legal power to protect themselves. It's crucial that women's rights be part of public health. Or take child well-being: as long as women are having too many children too soon, and are suffering and dying in childbirth, kids are not going to flourish. Or development: any country that puts half its brains and talent and energy under a burqa is wasting half its resources-- more than half, when you consider the need of children for educated, healthy mothers and for economically stable families.

To take a stab at a question Michelle raised in her first post, I'm not much of a multiculturalist. Or rather, I see every culture, like our own, as fluid and conflicted. Who decides the position of "the culture" ? A priest, an imam, a legislature? Older people or younger ones? What people say? What they do? What they'd like to say or do but can't because of the consequences? The girls who want to choose their own husbands are just as much a part of their cultures as the parents who give them to some old man. In the United States, a great deal of violence against women is condoned and always has been. Should we just shrug our shoulders, and say "that's our culture"? Or do we look to the parts of our tradition that promote equality and justice for all?

That said, there are obviously more and less successful ways of promoting women's rights around the world. Connecting them closely with an invading US army and a corrupt and violent occupation is probably asking for a backlash. Ditto letting women's emancipation become the plaything of a kleptocratic elite.